Segregated Neighborhoods

To follow the requests of Dalton Conley, I used the racial dot map program to view the racial locations within my hometown neighborhood, along with the racial locations of the greater area. What I found was very interesting, my specific neighborhood was found to be entirely white with the occasional sprinkle of Asian. This discovering was not surprising seeing that according to the US Census, my hometown is contains a population of approximately 80% white, 15% Asian, and only 5% other. As a result of this race distribution the majority of all areas in the town are white with small Asian communities around the outskirts of town. However, just beyond the border of my hometown is a large community of almost entirely Hispanic people. As a result I believe that my neighborhoods homogeneous demographics is directly related to the entire town’s racial segregation due to the economic status of the town as a whole. As I established in a former post, my hometown as one of the highest mean household incomes in the whole state of Illinois. This means that the high income level has created a upper class society with higher taxes, more expensive houses, and better schools which other minorities cannot afford when observing the mean household incomes of African American and Hispanic/Latino families which are on average lower than that of white suburban families. This would explain the segregation of the large population of Hispanic/Latinos in the nearby town which has a much lower mean household income. In my experience living in this area, the data is very consistent with my observations, for example the majority of my high school was rich white kids with the majority of the African American and Hispanic/Latino students being bused into the area from Chicago as a part of the No Child Left Behind program. As a whole I believe that this is an example of how segregated neighborhoods negate the idea of a socially just world. Sociologists often mention the cycle of poverty, and I believe that my area is an example of this theory as the opposite or cycle of wealth. Because my area was so wealthy, and predominantly white, we received the best resources such as one of the best public and private education systems in the country, lots of real world job connections, and the ability to never work until we graduate because of our parent’s wealth. Then this upbringing allows us to get high paying jobs to live in expensive neighborhoods that, once again, exclude the lower class. Today unsegregated neighborhoods are almost far-fetched ideas because of area like mine which are designed to resist gentrification.